Leveraging social networking

November 14

I’m not big on instant messaging. It is to e-mail what a snap of the fingers in your face is to a gentle waving of the hand across a room.
But sometimes I like it. A few weeks ago when I was checking messages on my Facebook account, the IM bubble opened up and my old friend David Peters, whose wife just had a baby, wrote: “Bret, you’ve been online for more than a minute and haven’t told me how beautiful my daughter is. What’s wrong?”
There’s not much that’s sweeter than a kvelling father.
And yesterday when I was checking my Facebook account BLT Steak sommelier Brett Feore appeared in the IM bubble and asked me to check out his new blog. He’s trying to find the right style for it, so I gave him feedback and we chatted about other things.
And guess what? It turns out he’s not the sommelier at BLT Steak anymore. No, that position is now occupied by Rachael Rakes, a Philadelphia native who spent a number of years in San Francisco, first at Mecca (in The Castro), and then at The Last Supper Club (in The Mission).
She was a captain at BLT Steak when it opened in 2004, learned more about wine from Fred Dexheimer, who’s BLT’s national wine & beverage diretor, and then worked in Brooklyn at Marlow and Sons (that would be Williamsburg).
Then she went to college to get a degree in Middle Eastern Studies before coming back to BLT Steak after Brett Feore left.
So you see, social networking can be a good way to get news for your blog.